The Iranian Tanzimat: The Global Codification Movement and Legal Reforms in 19th-Century Iran

This article analyzes reformist treatises from nineteenth-century Iran that called for tanzimat (re-ordering). Central to this reformist discourse was the demand for the enactment of qānūn (modern law). This new conceptualization of law emerged under the influence of European legal codification, which reshaped the characteristics of law across numerous Muslim societies during the nineteenth century. The Iranian case is particularly significant because its theory of law developed largely within a noncolonial context and independently of direct Western intervention. Ultimately, the redefinition of qānūn extended legal constraints to monarchical authority and action, laying the foundations for constitutional thought in Iran decades before the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–11.